It’s a steamy 80 degrees in New England. In February. That’s bad.

From the North Pole to New England, the weather this week is far, far out of the ordinary — then again, there isn’t really any such thing as ordinary any more. While the numbers are still rolling in, it looks like Wednesday will be the warmest February day in history for nearly the entire U.S. East Coast.

The result is weather more suited to Memorial Day than Valentine’s Day. In the Northeast, temperatures are as much as 40 degrees higher than normal, with bewildered residents shedding their parkas to hit the beach. Boston hit 70 degrees on Tuesday — a mark not normally reached until May 27th — and then topped that on Wednesday with a June-worthy 72 degrees. It was the first instance of back-to-back 70-degree February days in nearly 150 years of record keeping in that city. Nearby, Fitchburg, Massachusetts hit 80 degrees.

In 2017, 17 states experienced their warmest February on record, leading to the early emergence of plants and animals across a huge swath of the southeast United States. Scientists rely on the connection between ecosystem signals and the weather to help define the official start of spring by the appearance of leaves, flowers, and birds — and last year’s signals were alarmingly out of whack.

There are obvious reasons to enjoy the starkly pleasant weather, but many are conflicted by yet another example of our strange new climate interrupting the natural rhythm of the seasons. There’s good reason to be unsettled: Plants and animals that have evolved together over millions of years have trouble adapting to change this fast. In some cases, when animals awake from hibernation, they might miss the emergence of the bug larvae that are their preferred food source– which themselves may have missed the early bloom of the flowers they rely on for food.